About

RickB- Human, Artist, Fool.

Ynys Mon, UK.

The blog is called ten percent because of what Kurt Vonnegut wrote when remembering Susan Sontag - She was asked what she had learned from the Holocaust, and she said that 10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and that 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and that the remaining 80 percent could be moved in either direction.-

And I'm writing it because I need the therapy and I lust for world domination.

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The Bush administration has instructed U.S. diplomats abroad to defend its decision to seek the death penalty for six Guantanamo Bay detainees accused in the Sept. 11 terror attacks by recalling the executions of Nazi war criminals after World War II.

A four-page cable sent to U.S. embassies and obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press says that execution as punishment for extreme violations of the laws of war is internationally accepted and points to the 1945-46 International Military Tribunals as an example. Twelve of Adolf Hitler’s senior aides were sentenced to death at the trials in Nuremberg, Germany, although not all were executed in the end.

The unclassified cable was sent by the State Department to all U.S. diplomatic missions worldwide late on Monday.

Projection? Chutzpah? The point where the rapist says the victim was asking for it? I actually think several of the Bush regime are so stupid and/or deluded they really believe this shit. A typical Rovian tactic, accusing others of ones own greatest weakness. On a completely unrelated note I see Tom Cruise is in a movie about von Stauffenberg…

PS. Remember this?

A Nuremberg chief prosecutor says there is a case for trying Bush for the ‘supreme crime against humanity, an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation.’

“It is bad enough that the UK is aiding Colombian military units that violate human rights, but for a British minister to be photographed posing with the very unit that has tortured and assassinated trade unionists is shameful.”

Surrounding the smiling face of the Foreign Office minister Kim Howells in a picture taken in the Colombian region of Sumapaz are a general linked to paramilitary death squads and soldiers of a notorious unit of the Colombian army accused, including by Amnesty International, of torturing and killing trade unionists.

The photograph, taken in a military base and posted on the Foreign Office website, was yesterday greeted with outrage by Labour parliamentarians and trade union leaders. Howells is pictured with the High Mountain Brigades, a unit held responsible for the killing of trade union activists, peasants and anti-narcotics police during the past three years.

Behind him stand the Colombian defence minister, Juan Santos, and General Mario Montoya, head of the Colombian army, reports of whose collaboration with paramilitary death squads and drug traffickers and links with disappearances and killings – including leaked CIA reports – were cited last year by US congressional leaders as part of the reason for the suspension of tens of millions of dollars of US military aid to the south American regime. The Colombian government denies the accusations.

Kevin Rudd, the Australian prime minister, is set to apologise to Aborigines who were taken from their families as children, saying that it was unfinished business for the nation.

The apology, due for Wednesday, will come 11 years after a landmark report into the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families under past assimilation policies, which recommended a national apology to what is known as the Stolen Generation. Rudd will deliver the announcement in parliament, making the historic gesture the first piece of parliamentary business for his Australian Labor Party government, which won power in November and ended almost 12 years of conservative rule.

He said the apology would be to the Stolen Generation, their families and descendants, but said the government would not set up a compensation fund, as any claims for compensation would be decided by the courts.

The previous conservative government led by John Howard refused to apologise, offering instead a statement of regret, saying current generations should not be held responsible for past actions. Howard, who lost his seat at the November election, said he would not attend the parliamentary sitting for the apology, which continues to divide the conservative Liberal Party.

Well no compensation plans is not good but this is a refreshing cultural shift away from the mean spirited, closed minded conservative years. But of course the slapheaded tory wanker hasn’t the decency to show his face although apparently the Queen thinks he might be neat, racists eh?

Speculation is mounting that Mr Howard has been personally selected by Queen Elizabeth to receive the Order of the Garter, the most senior and oldest British Order of Chivalry.

John McDonnell MP, Chris Coverdale: International War Law Expert and Annie Machon of the Campaign to Make War History brief MPs and the media on allegations of war crimes committed against the people of Iraq by Britain’s former Prime Minister and former Attorney General.

Officers from Scotland Yard have commenced a criminal investigation into the deaths of Iraqi citizens killed during the armed invasion and occupation of Iraq. The Metropolitan Police are acting in response to crimes reported by peace activists from We Are Change UK and The Campaign to Make War History. In an unprecedented step, the case was handed to the War Crimes division of the Counter Terrorism branch who are now investigating allegations of 14 criminal offences committed by Tony Blair, Lord Goldsmith and others. The offences are under the International Criminal Court Act 2001, which came into effect under English common law, just two days before 9/11.

Two Members of We Are Change UK and a representative from the Campaign to Make War History were interviewed for six hours at Belgravia Police station on the 20th December 2007. Evidence was provided to the police relating to the crimes of:-

• genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and conduct ancillary to these crimes under Sections 51 and 52 of The International Criminal Court Act 2001.
• a crime against peace and complicity in a crime against peace under Articles 6 and 7 of The Nuremburg Principles.
• murder, incitement to murder and conspiracy to murder under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861.
• conspiracy to commit genocide, a crime against humanity and war crimes under the Criminal Law Act 1977.

It’s a start, I can imagine even now senior officers are being co-opted to strangle the investigation, that’s if anyone is taking it seriously in the first place, but it does not have to be that way. These people lied, most deliberately in order to kill and steal. The first thing to do is report this far and wide, to force it to be taken seriously. Pressure and support for the investigation would help, how might we go about that? More in time, for now let’s put this onto the agenda and into people’s minds.

Tony Blair has been holding discussions with some of his oldest allies on how he could mount a campaign later this year to become full-time president of the EU council, the prestigious new job characterised as “president of Europe”. Blair, currently the Middle East envoy for the US, Russia, EU and the UN, has told friends he has made no final decision, but is increasingly willing to put himself forward for the job if it comes with real powers to intervene in defence and trade affairs. (ht2 at-Largely)

Hell NO! No fucking way! He was instrumental, one of the inner cabal that lied the US & UK into the Iraq war, not only should he not be EU president, he should be prosecuted for his war crimes. His messianic greed for power is astonishing, no wonder he was so close to Bush. Speaking of which-ish

As Bush tries to stave off disaster in Afghanistan, Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, flies to London next week to talk to Gordon Brown — George Bush’s closest ally — to find a way to send more troops to Afghanistan. With UK defence minister Des Browne saying recently that Britain could be in Afghanistan for decades (http://tinyurl.com/2lhmqj), Rice will try to get Gordon Brown to commit more troops now, as a lever to get other countries to increase their deployment.

Stop the War Coalition is calling an emergency protest on Wednesday 6 February. We do not yet have details of Rice’s meetings with Gordon Brown but we anticipate that our protest will be at Downing Street, the timing to be announced as soon as her plans are known.

The army have cut basic training by half, to thirteen weeks, to get more soldiers to Afghanistan

A federal appeals court ruled against the Bush administration Friday in a central case on Guantánamo detainees, declining to reconsider an order that the government has to turn over virtually all its information on many detainees.

Unless the Justice Department obtains a stay, the decision, from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, will clear the way for detainees’ lawyers to press 180 appeals cases of inmates at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, challenging their detentions. The cases contest decisions by military panels that the men are properly held as unlawful enemy combatants.

In the new decision, Chief Judge Douglas Ginsburg of the appellate court wrote that letting the government withhold information on detainees from their lawyers and the court “would render utterly meaningless judicial review” of the military panels’ decisions.

“Unless the Justice Department obtains a stay” that would be the department run by a man (approved by dems & repubs) who refuses to say whether waterboarding is torture, lay your bets please.